The Renseignements Généraux (2)

RG Dossier

The Renseignements Généraux (2)

Their bad reputation goes back a long way. “Watch everyone except me!” Napoleon is said to have recommended to Fouché, who was presenting his new “special commissioners” to him.

Their current name - the “Renseignements généraux” - is a Vichy invention, which does not help matters. For decades this heavy ancestry has weighed on this curious police service of political information answering to the Ministry of the Interior. For the RG seem to have been a little too regularly subscribed to the Republic’s dirty tricks. The list is long, from the kidnapping of Ben Barka to the murder of Pastor Doucé, by way of the Markovic scandal.

The function of the RG There are 3,893 “RG”. New recruits are trained at the Gif-sur-Yvette centre. Today this police force concerns itself with everyone Operational research:

Surveillance and identification of potentially dangerous individual or collective activities. Violent far right and far left, drug trafficking, skinheads, Islamism.

Analysis: Study of the great facts of society and their impacts on opinion. French Islam, cults, drugs, urban violence, the world of telematics, dubious money, charitable associations, the world of exclusion, art trafficking, anti-abortion circles, the environment. They have recently reinforced their research on the associative world (in AIDS, in drug addiction and in exclusion). Their function has thus been transformed: it is no longer only a matter of watching known actors, but also of helping the government to identify and understand new phenomena and actors. Tasks closer to academic analysis than to police work. The database on cults, with its classification and its multiple entries, designed by Commissioner Laurence Affres thanks to a network of 50 correspondents in the provinces, has thus become a reference. Local presence constitutes the RG’s best asset: a mesh of 2,700 agents spread across the whole territory, with a minimum of seven or eight men in the smallest departments. “This network has no equivalent; it is a guarantee of proximity and of composure in the face of events, explains a commissioner. That is why our information is often more reliable than that of the media, who investigate less and less and work more and more in a closed circuit”. Every day, from the smallest prefectures as from the largest conurbations, more than 500 notes on every possible subject come up to the central headquarters, rue de Saussaies. After skimming, the information the central director of the Renseignements Généraux judges essential for the government becomes the object of four or five synthesis notes, on the principle “one sheet, one subject”. Assembled, they constitute the “minister’s dossier”, distributed in a dozen copies and delivered every evening of the week, around 6:30 pm, to the cabinets of the Minister of the Interior, the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. Other information, more sensitive and often drafted in the conditional, becomes the object of the famous “white notes”, devoid of any service letterhead (fewer than ten a day), which the central director hands personally to the minister, sometimes accompanied by information given orally. The control of the masses The RG continue to measure opinion. Three essential tools are assigned to this task: the “gut feeling” estimate, computer simulation and the true opinion poll. First, every fortnight, the service publishes an “opinion note”. Drafted by the commissioner responsible for the “analysis and prospective” section, it synthesises the notes drawn up by some fifteen local correspondents. The latter are chosen according to a subtle weighting between their geographical location and their individual competence, due to knowledge of their town or region, but also to their nose - their particular gift for sensing opinion simply through a few well-selected conversations. After a televised intervention by the President of the Republic, for example, they make telephone calls among their acquaintances in the Chiraquian, centrist and socialist electorates, among civil servants, shopkeepers, elected officials, trade unions, then draft two or three pages. At rue de Saussaies, in Paris, these are synthesised into one or two sheets. Since the election of Jacques Chirac, the government has asked, in addition to the twice-monthly notes, for a few specific opinion notes, notably on government action, the nuclear tests and reactions to the terrorist attacks. Next, for 4 years the central Directorate of the RG has had the Salamandre system, a powerful, fast and reliable computer program of partial voting results. Thanks to a good selection of polling stations, this highly sophisticated system makes it possible to give a global estimate (at 2 months, 1 month and one week from the polls), often prompter and above all surer than the polls. That was the case at the last presidential election. And Salamandre had given, before the referendum on Maastricht, a good forecast, when the polling institutes could not decide. Finally the heavy artillery: the Central Office of Statistics and Polls (OCSS). Behind this discreet acronym hides a polling body of the RG’s own. An enormous, costly machine, but serious and particularly reliable. For the OCSS works on large samples: from 2,000 to 4,000 people, whereas the private polls published by the press rarely concern more than 1,000 people. And the OCSS does not work by telephone, but at the home of the person polled, its agents passing themselves off as subcontractors of institutes well known to the general public. The OCSS, which can only be activated by the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior, is no longer limited to electoral polls, but interests itself in questions of society, more or less precise, such as “the image of the CRS with the public” or “The perception of insecurity”. To read the third part of the dossier, RG, the scandal machine?

after the book by M. Rougelet, click here

Read also http://www.renseignementsgeneraux.net/rg.php